We’ve been busy travelling from Savannah towards our stick house in Indiana. We’re visiting our stick house in order to clean it up and put in some landscaping touches to see if we can’t attract some serious buyers. We’ve also cut our price another $10,000. So far, we’ve cut our price about 10% from our initial price.

Since Savannah, we’ve gone to Cordele, GA and stayed in an absolutely beautiful campground in the Georgia Military Veterans Park. While there, we visited the Andersonville National Historic Site and the Jimmy Carter National Historic Site. Then we made our longest one day trip in our rv from Cordele, GA to Tunica, MS where we spent two days at the casinos. We then went to Bonne Terre. MO where we camped at the St. Francois State Park in order to visit with my wife’s sister. We then went to Cahokia, IL to visit more of my wife’s family and some of our friends from when we lived in the area.

I hope to post some of the pictures we took along the way as well as resuming my campground reviews soon. Hope you’re enjoying your adventures as much as we’re enjoying ours.

Our last days in Savannah went fast.  We went to Paula Deen’s restaurant, Lady and Sons and had a really good meal.  Below is a picture of the sign outside the restaurant.

Here is a picture of Cindy with the menu — our little piece of history proving that we were there!

We spent some time running down some Forest Gump (the movie) sites — the church spire where the feather was released at the start of the movie and the square where Forest was seated on a bench telling his story.  in the process, we ran into a lot of interesting squares and buildings — hopefully I’ll eventually get these uploaded to my internet picasaweb site and be able to give you the url.

We also spent one day going to Tybee Island.  We also visited Fort Pulaski on our way to Tybee Island.  We visied the beach, saw the lighthouse, then ate at the Crab Shack whose slogan is “where the elite eat in their bare feet”.

All in all, we had an enjoyable time, but both Cindy and I would rate Charleston, SC as a more enjoyable city to visit.  Now we’re off to camp at the Georgia Veterans State Park so that we can visit the Jimmy Carter National Historic Site and the Andersonville Historic Site.

Below is a map of where we’ve been since our initial break-in trip the middle of December. If you’re interested in creating a map like this go to http://www.epgsoft.com/index.html. In addition to being able to create a map like this that you can then insert into your blog, email, home page; there is also a rather nifty campground map that allows you to search for campgrounds. Thanks to Chris Guld of blog.rv.net for his post on this.

After having spent a little over two days in Savannah, GA, it looks like Cindy and I are going to really like this town. We spent yesterday getting oriented in Savannah by taking one of many tram tours through the historical district. We followed that up by having dinner at Uncle Bubba’s Oyster House. For those of you who don’t watch Food Network, Uncle Bubba is the brother of Savannah’s most famous cook, Paula Deen. My wife and I split a low country boil which has steamed shrimp, sausage, potatoes, and corn on the cob. The shrimp were absolutely fantastic.

Today was a housekeeping day as we attended to chores. As usual, our gps was absolutely awful. When Garmin can not find a town’s post office or the local Wal-Mart, then you know you’re in trouble. I’ve lost any bashfulness I ever had about asking strangers for directions — it is much easier than relying on my Garmin Nuvi 350 — even with the latest maps and software loaded.

Tomorrow we plan on going back into Savannah.

By the way, after experiencing temperatures in the eighties during the last two months in Florida, it sure has seemed cold here in the Savannah area as temperatures are in the sixties during the day and are forecast to dip into the thirties over the next two nights.

Today I changed the title of my blog from jim wilson’s blog to “Living in an RV or Why I Use my Wife’s Deodorant”. It struck me this morning while using my wife’s deodorant that living in an rv has brought about many practical changes. We no longer have separate toiletries for example. We installed a water filter on our kitchen water tap to avoid having to take up valuable space with bottled water. And in the process, we’re growing closer and having more fun than we ever have. We’re hoping that this new life’s adventures never end.

We’re on the road again — this time to Savannah, GA.  Travel by itself will normally cut down on my blog entries, but I now have another issue.  I installed the latest version of Itunes and it completely trashed my Itunes library.  So for the second time in six months, I’ll have to completely rebuild the library.  Yes, I know that I should have backed it up, but when you’ve got close to 10,000 tunes, backing up gets to be a pain.  So, I’ll suffer doing the rebuild knowing that I could have avoided the problem.  I hope to be back blogging in a couple of days.

We spent a month at Elite Resorts Crystal River (Florida). This RV park was called Rock Crusher Canyon RV Park until Elite Resorts purchased it during our stay in January, 2008. We chose this park due to its high ranking in Woodall’s directory (5W5W). We originally opted to stay for one week, but quickly extended to one month. We decided to stay for a month mostly due to the fact that we were just exhausted after traveling for almost a week without a break.

The campground itself is absolutely beautiful with many large, wooded sites. Many of the sites were occupied by snowbirds who had been coming to this park for many years. The fellow campers were very friendly. All sites had 20/30/50 amp connections, water with good pressure, sewer connections, and cable tv. The usual range of activities from bingo to card games were offered. During our time at the campground, wireless internet connectivity was very limited and the heated swimming pool was unheated. Supposedly these were victims of the change of ownership process, but they were very unwelcome.

The Crystal River area we found to have very few things to recommend a long stay in the area. The main attraction to the area appears to be manatee viewing. However, once you’ve seen the manatees, there is little else in the immediate area. For example, the nearest super wal-mart is in Inverness, over fifteen miles from the park. The choice in restaurants is also very limited – both ourselves and others in the campground regularly traveled to Inverness to eat out. If you’re into kayaking, this area appears to attract those who are active kayakers. There are three state parks in the immediate area. Crystal River is also far enough north that we regularly had to use our furnace here.

As i mentioned, Elite Resorts purchased this park during our stay. This was our first experience with a park whose owner is involved solely in selling RV lots. During an introductory luncheon with the new owners, it became very apparent that most of the campers who had been coming to the park for many years were having big problems with the new owner. For example, many people had been staying in the same site year after year. This will no longer be possible. The new owners did promise improvements such as actually having wireless internet in all the park, building a new bigger activities building and pool, and fixing the heater in the old pool.

As much as I wanted to like this park, I won’t be coming back here. I’ve pretty much done everything there is to do in the area. Also, if I’m going to travel to Florida for the winter, I really want to stay some place where the temperatures are warmer than in Crystal River. For example, there was a hard freeze during our stay and several nights below freezing. With the antagonism towards the current owners, I just don’t want to be involved in a situation where the campers do not trust the owners.

As you can see from my lack of posts over the last couple of months, I have really been lax at posting. I have to admit that I admire people like Howard at the RV-Dreams blog who religiously post almost every day.

So — what has happened since my last post? We’ve spent a month in Lake Placid, Florida and almost six weeks at Titusville, Florida. We’ve had our granddaughter Katy here during her spring break from grade school in Lexington, KY. We’re about to leave Florida for a slow trip back to Indiana.

And, I’m going to try again to start posting regularly. My first batch of posts will be to review some of the campgrounds we stayed in and to share any wisdom we gained about how to select a campground with only information from the internet and published directories. I promise that I’ll at least get out the campground reviews soon. After that, I’ll see if I can be more dedicated about posting to this blog. Until my next post, I hope you’re enjoying your adventure as much as Cindy and I are enjoying ours!

I’ve just seen the trailer for the new Indiana Jones movie. It looks like another winner in the Indiana Jones movies.
Looks like I’ll be seeing it when it comes out on May 22.

How do you know if a storm is coming if you’re staying in an rv park?

If almost everyone has their awnings up, almost certainly at least high winds (more than 15 mph) are forecast. If the awnings are up and the slides are in, then you can be certain that a bad storm is moving your way. Yesterday while walking the dog, I noticed many awnings were up. I came in the rv, checked weather underground and saw winds gusting to 18 mph at Arcadia which is about 30 miles sw of Lake Placid (FL). Needless to say, I got Cindy to help me and the awning went up. Later while walking the dog (again), I saw that almost everyone had put their awning up. And sure enough, we had a storm move thru later.